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from the documents-definitely-need-javascript dept.
Daniel Glazman believes that EPUB has reached a technical dead end.
- It is impossible to aggregate a set of web pages into a EPUB book through a trivial zip, and it is impossible to unzip an EPUB book and make it readable inside a Web browser even with graceful degradation.
- Despite the International Digital Publishing Forum merging with W3C in January 2017, EPUB continues to diverge from web standards.
- The EPUB 3.1 specification has been rescinded because it is too costly and complex for the eBook industry to adopt.
Mr. Glazman's solution? The WebBook format. From the announcement:
I have then decided to work on a different format for electronic books, called WebBook. A format strictly based on Web technologies and when I say "Web technologies", I mean the most basic ones: html, CSS, JavaScript, SVG and friends; the class of specifications all Web authors use and master on a daily basis. Not all details are decided or even ironed, the proposal is still a work in progress at this point, but I know where I want to go to.
[...] I have started from a list of requirements, something that was never done that way in the EPUB world:
- one URL is enough to retrieve a remote WebBook instance, there is no need to download every resource composing that instance
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a Web site's directory and are directly readable by a Web browser using the URL for that directory
- the contents of a WebBook instance can be placed inside a local directory and are directly readable by a Web browser opening its index.html or index.xhtml topmost file
- each individual resource in a WebBook instance, on a Web site or on a local disk, is directly readable by a Web browser
- any html document can be used as content document inside a WebBook instance, without restriction
- any stylesheet, replaced resource (images, audio, video, etc.) or additional resource useable by a html document (JavaScript, manifests, etc.) can be used inside the navigation document or the content documents of a WebBook instance, without restriction
- the navigation document and the content documents inside a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the metadata, table of contents contained in the navigation document of a WebBook instance can be created and edited by any html editor
- the WebBook specification is backwards-compatible
- the WebBook specification is forwards-compatible, at the potential cost of graceful degradation of some content
- WebBook instances can be recognized without having to detect their MIME type
- it's possible to deliver electronic books in a form that is compatible with both WebBook and EPUB 3.0.1
Compatibility with EPUB 3.0.1 is a good way to start adoption. Now to see if WebBook catches on. The GitHub repository is here.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 22 2018, @11:54PM (24 children)
The biggest problem is fidelity or reproducibility.
For the most part, Web "developers" squander all their time ensuring that content renders properly across as many clients as possible. It's an enormous overhead, and there doesn't seem to be any hope of the situation improving; this is because both consumers and producers only care about shiny surface details rather than underlying foundations.
Alas, Knuth long ago new that the problem of publishing is a problem of fidelity; in TeX, he not only created a superb collection of algorithms for laying out the content of books (albeit, the system which uses those algorithms is pretty ugly), but he also produced an output format long before PDF, intended to capture that layout in a completely reproducible fashion. It's too bad nobody outside of the hard sciences cared to build on his work.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by https on Monday April 23 2018, @01:34AM (5 children)
Your "squander" assessment is generous. Fidelity via HTML isn't a problem, it's fiction by design.
The whole point of HTML is that the publisher does not know how client software shall render it, and isn't supposed to care. My client could be text-to-speech, and render an EM tag with exactly the same intonation but with a background sound effect of klaxons. Your client could be eye-tracking AI worthy of three Nobel Prizes and a Fields Medal, where whenever your eye is looking at text tagged EM, disco lights flicker on the back of the tablet - unless you're moving your gaze backwards. Alex could make one that vibrates the Braille pins, the showy bugger.
All would be perfectly valid presentations.
There's some overlap between them, but trying to treat HTML as similar to print shows a fundamental misunderstanding.
Offended and laughing about it.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @01:40AM (1 child)
And yet designers make that mistake constantly, by insisting on pixel-perfect layouts, and artsy custom fonts.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:38AM
The problem is that clients just do not implement presentation rigorously, so it doesn't really matter what your CSS is—it is likely not to produce the same results between different systems.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:27AM (1 child)
Christ. Do you plebs ever tire of your straw?
Nobody claimed to use [just] HTML for those purposes. What the fuck do you think CSS (and, yes, Javascript) are for? Goddman PRESENTATION, that's what!
Asshat.
(Score: 3, Touché) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:24AM
Spying? <gd&r>
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by bradley13 on Monday April 23 2018, @08:00AM
"the publisher does not know how client software shall render it, and isn't supposed to care."
well, yes, that's how it was supposed to be. The publisher could send their suggestions, but the client would - in the end - render the document however it wanted. For example, re-flowing text to match the actual window width. Of course, it took almost no time before marketing weenies - used to the world of print - wanted to dictate exactly how their pages should appear. Initially, they played with things like frames, to force a fixed-width presentation.
This is part of what drove CSS, which was initially simple and understandable, into the abomination which became CSS/3. If you have never done so, go have a look at the sheer size of the CSS specifications - thousands of pages - then imagine actually trying to implement them. It's seriously insane, and it's driven by the need of publishers to control the precise presentation of their content - in direct contradiction to the original goals of the web.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 23 2018, @02:08AM (13 children)
It is quite possible that I never see anything on the web as the author intended. I long ago blocked web fonts. I see absolutely no reason why I should download some special font, just to read something. Documents render quite well, for the most part, without web fonts. I did install Google's collection of fonts after an article here on Soylent. The collection seems to make some difference, here and there, but I never cared enough to dig in to it.
Bottom line, I don't need web fonts. My machine can cache enough fonts to make any document readable, including cyrillic and Asian fonts. If ever I need Hebrew, or some obscure language that I've never read in my life, I can install suitable fonts directly onto my machine.
Do my documents look exactly like the one the author produced? Who knows? Who *really* gives a damn, other than the author? That author has no authority to decide that I must have some frivolous font before I can read his documents. That entire web font nonsense is frivolity taken to extremes.
Paranthetically - using web fonts probably enables someone to track who is reading what.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:21AM (12 children)
Typing a comment via a modern, high-end mobile Android phone is a clusterfuck.
The Web sucks, and SoylentNews proves it over and over.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Monday April 23 2018, @04:29AM (6 children)
Typing a comment is just typing plain old text. And SN uses a plain old text input box that existed since the dawn of the web. If Android doesn't handle that well, that's not a failure of the web. It's a failure of Android.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:47AM (5 children)
Seriously. Are you people fucking braindead? What's wrong with you?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:23AM (4 children)
Ah, I see, you've run out of arguments.
No, wait, you never had any actual arguments to begin with.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @05:36AM (3 children)
Are you braindead, too?
(Score: 3, Funny) by Runaway1956 on Monday April 23 2018, @06:06AM (2 children)
Yes, we are all braindead, except for you. You are the one-eyed man in the land of the blind. Only you can save us from ourselves. ALL HAIL THE UNBRAINDEAD ANONYMOUS COWARD!!
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @06:43AM (1 child)
All of the AC's points still stand.
(Score: 3, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @10:31AM
Well, since that AC had no point, that's vacuously true.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @04:33AM (4 children)
Typing anything on any "smart" phone is a clusterfuck. Likewise any tablet. If you need to type, get a keyboard.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:53AM (1 child)
SoylentNews adds a whole 'nother layer of hell.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by kazzie on Monday April 23 2018, @09:24AM
Given that you keep posting here, does that make you a masochist?
(Score: 1) by pTamok on Monday April 23 2018, @07:17AM (1 child)
Typing anything on any "smart" phone is a clusterfuck. Likewise any tablet. If you need to type, get a keyboard.
Hats nit true, the worm predictor get sit right often enough too bee useless. You don't heed yo tripe so many skerries in the retinitis.
(To be fair, the predictor on my phone allows me to type the above sentence correctly* using 56 keystrokes, instead of 111. I've often wanted a word predictor like that in my word processor, but I'm not a touch typist. In any case, typing is rarely the problem, it's all the other UI elements and processes around an input field that make the experience suck.)
*That's not true, the word predictor gets it right often enough to be useful. You don't need to type so many letters on the keyboard.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Monday April 23 2018, @08:03PM
Yes, but you really need to proofread carefully.
Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts"- --Daniel Patrick Moynihan--
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @04:08AM (3 children)
The biggest problem is *the inappropriate expectation of* fidelity or reproducibility.
The web's design goals excluded WYSIWYG from the beginning, for good reason. You can't have proper device independence and "fidelity" as you term it - perversely referring to fidelity of *presentation* rather than of content.
It's not just that those who don't rememeber LaTeX keep re-inventing it, poorly - it's that they've succeed in shoe-horning their desires into web standards where they have no place at all.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @04:31AM (2 children)
Why does CSS offer measurements like "6in" for "6 inches" then? What's the point of that?
The real problem is you fuckers fake everything. The CSS half-wits thought it would make sense to re-define "pixel" as a stable measurement: 1 pixel on a "virtual" 90 PPI screen. Why? Because all the moronic, mathless user-experience "engineers" in the world built their tasteless designs around Wintel and the commonest monitors, which were 90 PPI (maybe Microsoft is the one who introduced that stupidity; I don't know). Well, that same fakeness and incompetence seeped into the base models of everything else in Web layout, such that the only sane way for most people do deal with positioning and dimensioning elements is to use a Javascript library to do the calculations on the client at "run-time". But that doesn't matter, anyway, because 20-something-year-old hey-I-just-want-go-climbing-and-hiking-and-post-to-facebook wunderkinds are responsible for coding up these clients.
The problem is not as you describe it.
The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure. We need a reboot.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Arik on Monday April 23 2018, @11:41AM (1 child)
"The problem is not as you describe it. The problem is that the "Oooo-look-shiny-object" morons are in control of the foundations of our society's infrastructure."
CSS is not part of the original design. It was added at the insistence of that same "morons" as you put it, and the justification at the time was that they were already abusing the heck out of HTML trying to control layout, and if we could get them to move that nonsense to a separate CSS file it would result in cleaner HTML files and easier-to-ignore presentation nonsense.
Very similar to the justifications given for adding ecmascript as well.
HTML is hated by "designers" because it is a functional system, not an aesthetic one, and they are the opposite. But this is their malfunction.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 23 2018, @02:18PM
Stylesheets are an ancient idea that are part of an important separation of structure and presentation, and a concept on which the venerated Tim Berners–Lee also apparently worked. Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]:
--
Circumcised knowledge leads to circumcised thought. Proof: Arik